NYT: Most weapons shipments to Syrian rebels are flowing to jihadists, not secularists

posted at 4:44 pm on October 15, 2012 by Allahpundit

Via Tom Maguire, the Times seems to assume that there is in fact a significant secularist/pro-western faction among Syria’s rebels. Is there? Enough of one to fight the fundamentalists to a stalemate, at least, after Assad’s gone and the country inevitably descends into a period of warlordism? Or is this going to be Egypt redux, where a smallish group of liberal revolutionaries gets lots of camera time up front to build western support and then ends up being steamrolled by the Islamist hordes afterward?

“The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it,” said one American official familiar with the outlines of those findings, commenting on an operation that in American eyes has increasingly gone awry.

The United States is not sending arms directly to the Syrian opposition. Instead, it is providing intelligence and other support for shipments of secondhand light weapons like rifles and grenades into Syria, mainly orchestrated from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The reports indicate that the shipments organized from Qatar, in particular, are largely going to hard-line Islamists…

American officials have been trying to understand why hard-line Islamists have received the lion’s share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition through the shadowy pipeline with roots in Qatar, and, to a lesser degree, Saudi Arabia. The officials, voicing frustration, say there is no central clearinghouse for the shipments, and no effective way of vetting the groups that ultimately receive them…

One Middle Eastern diplomat who has dealt extensively with the C.I.A. on the issue said that Mr. Petraeus’s goal was to oversee the process of “vetting, and then shaping, an opposition that the U.S. thinks it can work with.”

Before, the intervention debate was over whether it’s better to withhold weapons and risk letting the rebels being annihilated by Assad or to send weapons to secularists/democrats and risk them being expropriated by jihadis. The hope early on was that that problem would be solved by mass defections and disobedience within the Syrian army leading to Assad either abdicating or being deposed. A year later, that hope is gone; Assad’s holding his forces together, probably thanks to Alawite fears of Sunni reprisals if the regime crumbles, but the rebels have gained territory across the country. So the calculus now is simpler: If the jihadis already have weapons and a protracted proxy war between Iran, the Saudis, and Turkey is guaranteed, the U.S. might as well start shaping its own pro-western proxy and making sure they’re not defenseless. It’s a small bit of leverage over a chaotic, gravely dangerous situation, and it might give the U.S. some input if/when Assad is gone and the Sunni factions reach a power-sharing arrangement. And of course, the quicker the fighting ends, the less time foreign jihadis have to set up inside the country. Walter Russell Mead:

Aiding the less ugly, less bad guys in the Syrian resistance, and even finding a few actual good guys to support, isn’t about installing a pro-American government in post civil war Syria. It’s about minimizing the prospects for a worst-case scenario—by shortening the era of conflict and so, hopefully, reducing the radicalization of the population and limiting the prospects that Syrian society as a whole will descend into all-out chaotic massacres and civil conflict. And it’s about making sure that other people in Syria, unsavory on other grounds as they may be, who don’t like al-Qaeda type groups and don’t want them to establish a permanent presence in the country, have enough guns and ammunition to get their way.

This is not a plan to edge the United States toward military engagement in Syria; it is aimed at reducing the chance that American forces will need to get involved. And, by accelerating the overthrow of Assad, it’s also a strategy for putting more pressure on Iran, pressure that represents our best hope of avoiding war with the mullahs as well. The whole point here is to keep our troops at home.

In other words, Petraeus and the CIA are trying to organize an “Awakening” among Syrians before jihadis become established to the degree that they were in western Iraq. The problem is, it looks like the best-case scenario in Syria after Assad is gone is Libya redux, with militias of all stripes armed to the teeth, quite possibly with chemical weapons, and some fledgling central government — likely more radical than Libya’s, thanks to the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence — struggling to cope with them. How does a U.S.-backed “secular” rebel group hope to hold off the panoply of Islamist militias backed by an Islamist government? This is why I started by asking about numbers: Ultimately, this comes down to manpower, and it’s hard to believe Islamists will be outmanned. (I’m assuming that the Alawites will either break away and form their own Iranian-backed Assad-istan enclave or that most of them will flee the country once Sunni radicals take power.)

A question from Jackson Diehl: Did Obama’s big “victory” in Libya actually cripple his ability to influence the much more important civil war in Syria?

The State Department’s Syria experts recognized the peril: If Assad were not overthrown quickly, they warned in congressional testimony, the country could tip into a devastating sectarian war that would empower jihadists and spread to neighboring countries. But Obama rejected suggestions by several senators that he lead an intervention. Instead he committed a second major error, by adopting a policy of seeking to broker a Syrian solution through the United Nations. “The best thing we can do,” he said last March, “is to unify the international community.”

As countless observers correctly predicted, the subsequent U.N. mission of Kofi Annan was doomed from the beginning. When the White House could no longer deny that reality, it turned to an equally fantastical gambit: Vladi­mir Putin, it argued, could be persuaded to abandon his support of Assad and force him to step down. The nadir of this diplomacy may have been reached on June 30, when Clinton cheerfully predicted that the Kremlin had “decided to get on one horse, and it’s the horse that would back a transition plan” removing Assad.

Needless to say, Putin did no such thing. The war went on; thousands more died. For the past three months, Obama’s policy has become a negative: He is simply opposed to any use of U.S. power. Fixed on his campaign slogan that “the tide of war is receding” in the Middle East, Obama claims that intervention would only make the conflict worse — and then watches as it spreads to NATO ally Turkey and draws in hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters.

He spent all his interventionist political capital on Libya and so now he’s committed to passivity towards Syria, at least until after the election when he’ll have more, ahem, “flexibility.” Romney should make that point often and loudly at the foreign policy debate next week, if only in the course of his criticism of security in Benghazi. Mitt’s already said he supports aid to the Syrian rebels, so we’re not having an “interventionism vs. non-interventionism” debate this campaign. (When do we ever?) It’s a basic point about Obama’s myopia. He wanted an “easy” war in Libya, and it’s made a harder one much harder. And now, unless something changes dramatically, the U.S. is bound to be playing drone whack-a-mole with terrorists hiding out in Syria for the next decade.

Blowback

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American officials have been trying to understand why hard-line Islamists have received the lion’s share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition through the shadowy pipeline with roots in Qatar, and, to a lesser degree, Saudi Arabia.

Really ?
Have they looked into the inspiration ring Hussein has on his finger ?
Does no one really remember Hussein’s bow to the king ?

Just before shutting down Rick’s Cafe Americain in Casablanca, Morocco, Capt. Louis Renault announced that he was shocked…shocked! to discover that gambling was taking place in a back room of the establishment.

American officials have been trying to understand why hard-line Islamists have received the lion’s share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition through the shadowy pipeline with roots in Qatar, and, to a lesser degree, Saudi Arabia.

Terrorists are getting the weapons because (1) They want them the most, (2) everyone we deal with in the middle east wants them to have them the most, and (3) we aren’t willing to put in the effort to stop them from getting them.

The terrorists fighting Assad are our enemy. Assad is less of an enemy than they are. “The enemy of your enemy is your friend” only applies to lesser enemies: Assad. If anything we should strike a grand bargain with Assad to give him clandestine assistance (in stopping support and weapons to the rebels, in providing intelligence, and in providing military advice) in which Assad accepts certain concrete terms favorable to our policy goals, in exchange for us helping him retain power. Our goals should be:

1. Syrian acceptance of Israel, recognition, demilitarization of the border, and open trade, etc.

2. The end of Syrian support for terrorists, and an embargo on support for hamas, etc.

3. A shift to a pro-West stance like the Saudis, where Assad’s regime cooperates with us in the war on terror.

We give him help now in exchange for concrete steps towards the above, and we reward him with modest foreign aid after in order to keep him as a client state.

I dont see why these goals are unobtainable given the circumstances. Why should Assad align itself with Iran over the US when the US can do so much more to help Assad retain power.

I dont see why these goals are unobtainable given the circumstances. Why should Assad align itself with Iran over the US when the US can do so much more to help Assad retain power.

kaltes on October 15, 2012 at 5:06 PM

Oh there are reasons all right…

You cannot reason with the Iranian Mullah’s about this, you cannot sanction them and have the Mullah’s come to their senses. The Mullah’s know exactly what they are doing, they have counted the cost and are 100 percent willing and prepared to pay that cost. These are not issues that are abstract negotiable constructs, these are deeply held core religious issues and the Iranian Mullah’s will not surrender or willingly damn their own souls to hell according to their beliefs to pacify the west.

Believing otherwise is to live in a delusion where you project your own complete lack of absolute moral compass on others with a complete and total disregard for what the other individual believes or how tightly they cling to their own convictions. Joe Biden and Barack Obama have no absolute moral compass, to them, everything is negotiable, everything and everyone has a price, all you have to do is find it. The Islamic faithful do not strap bomb to themselves and blow themselves up because their core beliefs are negotiable, they do so because their core religious beliefs mean more to them then their temporal lives do. If the leaders of the Western World do not wake up to this reality and wake up to it soon, then they will damn us all to a world of unimaginable violence. Sometimes it really is better to kill one single individual than to let a thousand die because of your inaction. Sometimes a war to prevent a slaughter of unimaginable proportions is really the correct moral and ethical decision.

Libya is awash in weapons, ranging from bullets and mortars to torpedoes and surface-to-air missiles.4
Over the course of more than four decades, Muammar Qaddafi’s regime acquired a stockpile of munitions
worth billions of dollars (US) and contained in dozens of storage facilities spread across Libya. Due to the
chaos and fighting of the 2011 armed conflict in Libya, some of these weapons proliferated across national
borders; however, vast quantities remained within Libya. Many of these weapons made their way into the
hands of those who opposed Qaddafi; others were destroyed or damaged in NATO’s bombing campaign; still
others entered civilian homes as scrap metal or souvenirs for display. Libya faces the unfortunate reality of
being a post-conflict country saturated with weapons and with a weak central government.
(More….)
============

The Chemical Weapons Convention entered into force for Libya on February 5, 2004, and Libya made its initial declaration in March 2004. Tripoli declared a CW stockpile, CWPFs and chemical industry facilities under Article VI of the Convention. In 2004, Libya had declared a stockpile of bulk liquid sulfur mustard, jellified mustard heel, and liquid precursors. Transitional National Council (TNC) forces during the unrest discovered undeclared Chemical Warfare (CW) weapons or material in Libya which they have since declared to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Libya’s TNC indicated they intend to cooperate with the international community regarding CW stockpiles in Libya including the destruction of CW material. Libya had destroyed 13.48 MTs, or 51.21% of its declared stockpiles of Category 1 chemical weapons and 555.71 MTs, or 39.64% of its Category 2 chemical weapons.

Italian leader Benito Mussolini reportedly authorized the use of gas bombs against Libyan rebels in 1929. T One report claims that 24 mustard gas bombs were dropped on a Libyan oasis in 1930. he Libyans were probably the victims of mustard gas attacks.

Libya had limited success with its chemical warfare program. Libya has experienced major setbacks to its chemical warfare program, first as a result of intense public scrutiny focused on its Rabta facility in the late 1980s and more recently on its Tarhuna underground facility. Nevertheless, Libya retains a small inventory of chemical weapons, as well as the a CW agent production capability.

American efforts set back Libya’s CW programs about ten years by focussing international attention on the Rabta and Tarhunah facilities and by preventing Libya from obtaining needed chemicals, equipment and experts. Libya, after spending a great deal of money, has only a small amount of agent and two facilities it dares not use for their intended purpose. If Qadahafi had been left undisturbed, he could have had thousands of tons of a variety of chemical agents and the ability to produce much more at will.

During the 1980s, Libya succeeded in producing up to 100 tons of blister and nerve agent at its Rabta facility, built with foreign assistance.

Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi has shown that he is willing and capable of using chemical weapons and missiles against his enemies. In 1986 and 1987 the Government of Chad accused Libya of using toxic gas and napalm against central government forces and against rebel forces. Libya may have used mustard gas [possibly Iranian-supplied] delivered in bombs by AN-26 aircraft in final phases of the war against Chad in September 1987. The wind blew the agent back onto the Libyan forces.

In the early 1990s, Qadhafi turned to private contractors from Thailand and other countries to construct facilities for storing a variety of chemical weapons, including nerve gases. The government of Thailand moved in 1993 to prevent its citizens from assisting Libya’s chemical weapons build-up. The United States welcomed this action by the Thai government.

Qadhafi had not given up the goal of establishing his own offensive chemicals weapons capability and Libya continues to pursue an independent production capability for the weapons. Qadhafi did not appear likely to sign or ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention. However, Libya remains heavily dependent on foreign suppliers for precursor chemicals and other key equipment. UN sanctions have severely limited that support. Finally, while Libya’s ability to deliver any of its existing stockpile of chemical agents is not great, the threat to Egypt, US forces in the region, or NATO cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Libya saw the United States as its primary external threat, owing especially to US support for United Nations sanctions against Tripoli for its refusal to turn over suspects in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103. Although Libya’s capabilities to use chemical agents and missiles are limited, Qadhafi could provide these weapons to states or terrorist groups he supports and that support him in return.

Qadhafi’s major limiting factor was Libya’s lack of a sufficient technological infrastructure to support domestic development of NBC weapons and missiles. All Libyan programs must rely on significant infusions of foreign equipment, technology, and expertise. Only Libya’s chemical warfare program has made any demonstrable progress developing facilities capable of supporting large-scale indigenous programs.

Despite ongoing embargoes and an unsettled domestic situation, Qadhafi supported development of NBC weapons and missile capabilities. His view apparently was that these weapons can advance his international position, can serve as deterrents against the West’s sophisticated weaponry, can be used to intimidate neighboring states, and can serve as cheaper alternatives to more expensive conventional systems.
(More……………..)
=======================

We can’t fight jihad in 20 or more countries. Eventually, we are going to need to put a wall up around these countries; no trade, no travel, no immigration, and no education visas.

If they step outside then we nail them.

Oil Can on October 15, 2012 at 1:09 PM

I wasn’t talking about a real wall, it was figure a speech. I mean we really can’t interact with these countries. Islam doesn’t get along with anybody. They need to be “sealed off” until their culture goes through several centuries of development. They can also do that without my tax money.

Oil Can on October 15, 2012 at 2:05 PM

It’s going to be a lot. Since 1979 (even going back to the 1950′s) there has growing jihadi movement. Over the last 10 years it’s really picked up the pace. Tyrants are being traded for Islamists. You are talking from Morocco to Pakistain. Even in East Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, parts of Phillipinnes, parts of Thailand are having problems.

One thing is Islam have never been unified (except of the first 20 years after Mohammed’s death), so there will be tons of internal fighting, plus tribal differences too.

My overall message is that this will have to be an internal revolution. You can’t bring civilization to them, Muslims need to discover that one their own. Maybe we can beem VOA to those countries to help them get started. But we shouldn’t sell them products, especially weapons.

The side with the most wild-eyed young suicide bombers will always win, eventually. “Kill all ya want, we’ll make more!”

That side might be 99% peaceful sheeple with internal and external apologists. You only need a lunatic fringe with nothing to lose to bring the force or the threat of force.

The women will soon all be wearing Hefty Lawn-n-Garden bags, and the men will live with long beards, because it’s easier to shut up and go along than to die. And they’ll consider themselves blessed as long as they can say “Things could be worse!”

MS. NULAND: All right, everybody. Happy Monday. The Secretary, as you know, is on her way to Peru. I have nothing at the top, so let’s go to what’s on your minds.

QUESTION: Can we start with Iran? A couple of things. One, what do you – well, Iran and Syria.
*****************************

What do you think about Mr. Brahimi’s trip to Iran? Do you feel that there is any benefit to trying to persuade the Iranian Government, which you have long accused of helping to foment and accelerate the violence in Syria, to try to arrange a ceasefire, as he apparently did?

QUESTION: Okay. Just a quick follow-up. He also

– there’s talk about 3,000 observer team – a 3,000 strong observer team to deploy in Syria
*********************************

after the Eid al-Adha. Would the United States support such a mission?

QUESTION: You said that your concern has always been that the government would – that one, that a truce has to be comprehensive, and two, your concern was that the government would not observe it or enforce it. If it were to be comprehensive, by which I would mean a complete cessation of hostilities, and if the government were to agree and abide by it – even if it’s just for that holiday

– is that acceptable to the U.S.?
***********************************

MS. NULAND: Again, I’m not going to get into speculating about what might happen and how it might happen. We’ve all been calling, for more than a year now, for an end to the violence. If there was an opportunity to do that under Mr. Brahimi’s leadership – under anybody’s leadership – obviously we would want to support that, but that’s not the condition that we’re in at the moment.
(More….)
===========

I can’t help but wonder: when do the bad guys take a few of the supposed 20,000 (I’m sure the number is a fraction of that) shoulder-launched SAMs and screw up air traffic through Europe for a long time to come. Can you imagine the effect of a dozen air liners shot down during take off on the same day? Makes me shudder just thinking about it.

In 80 years of constant battling they never made ANY headway in Egypt.

Then Obama gets elected and 3 short years later they are in total control of Egypt.

Simultaneously, islamists are gaining in most of north Africa and Jordan and Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan.

I would say this is all the result of appeasment and ineptness and naivete except for the FACT that the results are entirely consistent.

In NOT A SINGLE or any islamist group ANYWHERE really suffered a strategic setback.

Usually such consistency of results is indicative of design.

DOUBT ME THAT ISLAMISTS ARE GAINING?

Ask Lara Logan.

They are stronger EVERYWHERE.

And it is the direct result of Obama’s proactive policies: insisting on the inclusion of the MB at his Cairo speech and then on the ousting of Mubarak; negotiating with the Taliban; waging war on Kaddafy – and aiding islamists there and in Syria.

And so on.

Nowhere is Obama aiding the cause of liberty.

Or our national security.

Or the security of our long-term allies.

That’s the true disaster.

The Benghazi attack is a direct result of Obama’s pro-islamist policies.

The Benghazi COVER UP is peanuts compared to the larger crisis that’s been created by obama’s policies.

REPEAT:

The Benghazi COVER UP is peanuts compared to the larger crisis that’s been created by obama’s policies.

Let it burn. When the jihadists win and come together in a conclave to celebrate and haggle, BOMB THE HELL OUT OF THEM.
Then massively squat on the Bekaa and seize every damned weapon in it.
Then the decent folks that fled to Turkey can have their country / rubble back.

How about let’s support the rebels against Assad until they start getting the upper hand and then let’s switch and give Putin the money to send in his troops to fight the rebels until they get the upper and then switch again to support the rebels until they all become just a memory. I mean, they’d never catch on to that kind of devious plan, would they?

If the jihadis already have weapons and a protracted proxy war between Iran, the Saudis, and Turkey is guaranteed, the U.S. might as well start shaping its own pro-western proxy and making sure they’re not defenseless. It’s a small bit of leverage over a chaotic, gravely dangerous situation, and it might give the U.S. some input if/when Assad is gone and the Sunni factions reach a power-sharing arrangement.

How many people do you think will join our “pro-western” proxy army? Couple of hundred folks? I hate to tell people this, but the Assad side is probably the most reasonable. That is not saying much, but it is the truth…

(Reuters) – International peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi appealed to Iran to help arrange a ceasefire in Syria during the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha as rebels and government forces fought street by street and village by village on Monday.(More…)
===========================================================

“Iraq never had any WMD’s! War Criminals Bush and Chaney made that Lie up!”

uppereastside

But, but, but…

“The weapons inspectors said he had them. He catalogued—they catalogued them. This was not some, some Cheney, you know, pipe dream. This was, in fact, catalogued. They looked at them and catalogued. What he did with them, who knows? The real mystery is, if he, if he didn’t have any of them left, why didn’t he say so? Well, a lot of people say if he had said that, he would’ve, you know, emboldened Iran and so on and so forth.”

On Friday, a CNN reporter asked Hillary Clinton what she was doing as the attack occurred, and Clinton responded with a 400-word answer that avoided the question. Here was the colloquy:

QUESTION: … could you tell us a little bit about what you were doing when that attack actually happened? I know Charlene Lamb, who as the State Department official, was mentioning that she back here in Washington was monitoring electronically from that post what was happening in real time. Could you tell us what you were doing? Were you watching? Were you talking with the President? Any details about that, please.

SECRETARY CLINTON: … I think that it is very important to recognize that we have an investigation going on. [Blah, blah for 222 words]. So that’s what an investigative process is designed to do: to try to sort through all of the information, some of it contradictory and conflicting. [Blah, blah for 76 words]. So I’m going to be, as I have been from the very beginning, cooperating fully with the investigations that are ongoing, because nobody wants to know more about what happened and why than I do. And I think I’ll leave it at that.

QUESTION: Mrs. Secretary, if you could, the question was –

SECRETARY CLINTON: I know, but I’m going to leave it at that.

Later on Friday, the State Department spokesperson was asked why Clinton hadn’t answered, and provided this response:

As you know, she’s not that interested in focusing on herself. But obviously, she was here very late that night. She was getting regular updates from both the DS Command Center and the senior NEA leadership in the building, she was making phone calls to senior people, and so she was obviously very much involved. But I think she was not interested in sort of giving a personal tick-tock. It’s not the way she operates. [Emphasis added].

Mitt had better think again about arming the rebels. Even the “good” ones.

Assad is a tyrant and an exporter of terrorism so it makes far more sense to depose him than it did Mubarack. But, after seeing how quickly Egypt turned to the Islamists, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Syria would do the same.